The omnivorous app | asymco - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2012/10/16/the-omnivorous-app/ <comment><USER2> Horace's rule for distinguishing between an app and a service works only in the simplest cases. It ignores things like Facebook Connect or "Connect with Twitter". It also ignores pure-advertising based experiences such as American Idol. The American Idol app on iOS does not require you to enter a pw/username.

Also, both app and service tend to imply one-to-one relationships.

In reality the 'new world' is composed of 'apps' that are client front-ends to back-end services that are actually composed of multiple services from 3rd parties that pull content from multiple sources and are made available via multiple channels and represent and re-enforce one or more brands.

These are some of the reasons why I decided to use a different term than either app or service: Experience.

 _An end-to-end user experience is a cohesive combination of devices,people, brands, channels, services, and content that improves over time._

Or, more succinctly, Experience equals stuff over time (exp = stuff/time).

Oh, how I love this line:

 _"The lowly app coupled with cloud-based services[1] is the termite that is set to eat the foundations of the largest of the industries still standing."_

The computing industry has been defined as a series of stair steps, each comprising a radical disruption, with consummate growth in the size of the industry, the profits, and advancement of technology. Mainframes → Minis → PCs → GUI → Web → Mobile.

What's next? I assert it is Experiences.

<http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/02/experience-stuff-time/></comment>


And this, too, shall pass away ... - <AUTHOR> As I write this 18 of 30 entries on the "newest" page are about WhatsApp. Whatever that is - I'd never heard of it before now. It's got four entries on the front page, and the top entry on the front page got 240 votes in 24 minutes. In the meantime a discussion about proofs, computers, automated reasoning, and other such issues has plummeted off the front page.  Even though the discussion is civil and constructive, it's fallen foul of the HN "flamewar detector" heuristic.
It's late here, and I have an early start in the morning, so I'll see what tomorrow brings.  See then if there's anything worth reading.
As I go, let me ask - what do you get out of HN? <comment><USER2> Just be glad that Facebook didn't buy Flappy Bird for 16 billion bitcoin...

I'm pretty sure when it happens the universe is supposed to end or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not this again. I get the latest news on Hacker "News". That includes one of current biggest apps selling for $16B or whatever it was.

It is also a way to pass the time. Instead of playing video games, I can waste my time reading things that have some sort of relevance to technology and such.

</comment><comment><USER4> At least this is better than the months where 19 of 30 entries on the front page were about bitcoin.

I'm not going to comment on the quality of posts. What brings me to HN is the user base. It is the people who make stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not so much these days, this place is getting filled with liberals who seem to have majored in the arts, not computer science of engineering.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's changed that much in the four months you've been a member.</comment></comment>


Why I Quit My Job at a Red-Hot $10B Startup, Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-i-quit-my-airbnb-job-and-what-its-like-to-work-there-2014-9 <comment><USER2> You're an inspiration Juney!

</comment><comment><USER3> Very insightful!

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazing write!</comment>


Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/12/facebook-whatsapp-european-commission-charges-misleading-merger-claim/ <comment><USER2> > the free content ad network failed to disclose

Interesting they don't call it a 'social network'. 'content ad network' is more accurate in my opinion.

<comment><USER3> Maybe we should adopt the term? "Content ad network" does have a certain ring to it.

<comment><USER4> I concur, even before there was widespread corporate advertising my impression of "social networking" was that it was more about advertising your personal activities and beliefs to your network than actually socializing within it.

<comment><USER5> social advertising

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish the US had laws like the EU that protected the consumer.

<comment><USER7> It only works when the laws are upheld. Facebook is a non-EU company, so their actions are purely a problem for the people locked to Facebook, not for the European economy.

The emissions excesses of diesel cars first discovered on Volkswagen were fined in the USA. Volkswagen is a non-USA company. The EU is still not taking action on the emissions because it is feared that that would impact the bottom line of the European car industry which is apparently more important than the health of the constituency.

[http://gerbrandy.eu/dieselgate-report-co-rapporteur- gerbrand...](http://gerbrandy.eu/dieselgate-report-co-rapporteur-gerbrandy- dieselgate-scandal-could-and-should-have-been-prevented/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mark my words: Just as the robber barons a century ago has lead to antitrust law, today's "data" robber baron tech giants will lead us to data competitive law 15 years from now.

<comment><USER9> And just like then, the data robber barons will probably be trillionaires by the time that happens, because by then they will have used the data to create super-intelligent AI, which will then create that wealth for them. At that time it won't matter what laws will be passed. The damage will have already been done and their personal trillion dollar wealth will have already been created.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Vanderbild, Rockefeller, Morgan, and all the other robber barrons went Scot free. So will Zuck, Larry, Sergey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > it being fined up to one percent of its annual turnover

Now they're fines we should be proud of. Not like the pathetic smack-on-the- wrist fines they've dished out to banks and Google that they can earn back in milliseconds.

<comment><USER11> J.P. Morgan was fined $13 billion, which is hardly a slap on the wrist. The biggest fines in corporate history have been in the US; take the big tobacco civil cases, for instance.

<comment><USER12> Civil cases sounds like - forgive me - 'The coffee is too hot, pay for me enough money to import it fresh using my private jet for the rest of my life' cases.

What I'm trying to say is: I feel there's a difference between a fine ("You're misbehaving, correct that") and greed ("You caused pain and I'm going to benefit here"). Most large-ish rulings in the US that ever reached me are part of the latter.

Then again, this is a matter of culture and might be fine (hah!) in the society that caused this and just look weird from the outside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's interesting to me is that a lot of times these things are somewhat open for interpretation depending on your definition of a monopoly, where the line is drawn between good business decisions and anti-competitive behavior, etc. In this case though it seems pretty clear cut. Facebook said they couldn't link WhatsApp and FB user ids, but then two years later they did exactly that.

Does Facebook really have any plausible response other than "oops"?

</comment><comment><USER14> > [Facebook] claimed that it wouldn't be able to knit together user IDs, > thereby combining the data of the two services.

Facebook REQUIRES your phone number when signing up nowadays (sometimes it asks a bit later - when you try to message peolple.

On Facebook Messenger, you sign up using you phone number.

On WhatsApp you sign up using your phone number.

I think it's pretty obvious that is was trivial to connect the two accounts.

<comment><USER15> Facebook messenger even tricked people into being the default SMS app on Android... And given all the permissions they ask, they can read the phone number themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't see why this is different than any other acquisition involving combining two userbases. Unless it's about the scale.

<comment><USER17> Because they lied, they said they would never associate the whatsapp data with the facebook one (and funnily enough HN believed them).

<comment><USER18> > and funnily enough HN believed them

That reeks of a very cheap excuse to just bash HN given the dramatic generalization you're throwing around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The State and its uncontrollable desire to steal.

</comment><comment><USER20> This looks equally bad on the EU, that they lacked the foresight to see that phone numbers in the WhatsApp database could be matched with phone numbers in the Facebook database.

<comment><USER21> Oh, the EU knew it _could_ happen; they were told it _wouldn 't_ happen. We need to operate on some basic level of common trust. If you wanna do business in the EU, you need to play by the rules.

As it turns out, not only _did_ it happen, the software/tech to make it happen was _already ready_! That makes a pretty strong case against Facebook's intentions.

I actually would agree that it was in hindsight stupid because of Facebook's business model. Why else would they want to buy WhatsApp other than profiling and spying?

Ideally, we don't even want corporations to have such huge amounts of data on us but we're not on that level yet. We're still too ignorant on that one. More Bad Things (tm) must happen first.

<comment><USER22> My belief in why they wanted to purchase WhatsApp was it presented a threat to fakebook [sic]. This is why they also purchased Instagram, and attempted the same for Snapchat. If true, then WhatsApp wasn't valued at $19 billion, but rather fakebook [sic] saw that removing the perceived threat was worth the price.

What astounds me the most, is the FTC doesn't seem to investigate tech acquisitions like other industries. Especially, when it seems there is a good indication choice is being removed from the market.

Although, I've seen a few deals structured in a way to make it seem like a smaller company is buying a larger one to avoid a review [at&t <-> SBC, Sears Holdings <-> K-Mart].

<comment><USER23> Maybe it's because of the low cost of entry for competitors? If people get upset with what Facebook does to WhatsApp, many other services will spring up and people will migrate to them.

When it comes to thing like Internet service, it's not really the same situation.

<comment><USER24> In tech the lifecycle seems to be something like

Stage 1 - That doesn't make sense and will never work Stage 2 - They turned down $1b they must be stupid Stage 3 - It is a monopoly and needs to be stopped

Stages may vary but what remains the same is that nothing in tech is certain. Companies try really hard to create monopolies that will probably have anti- trust issues because the alternative is if they don't they will probably die (more so true after raising a lot of money and signing expensive long term office leases.)

From a longer historical perspective, nothing at all is certain. Take a look at the various office skyscrapers and stadiums in the US, the names change. Some of the giant corporations of 50 years ago may still be around in some form, but they are shadows of their former selves. The world changes fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is anything Facebook currently doing not shady?

I'm not even trying to be snarky, it just seems like every single thing Facebook is doing lately is tainted with misinformation, corruption and spin. Just endless spin and lies.

<comment><USER26> Is anything <your_average_mega_corporation> currently doing not shady ? That's becoming a really big problem.

<comment><USER27> Well, <some_average_mega_corp> is paying my salary in a particularly non-shady way.

There is more to any group of people than what hits the news. (This insight is not limited to businesses.)</comment></comment></comment>


One gene appears to regulate the brain's ability to form new memories - <AUTHOR> http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/hippocampus-memory-genes-1222.html

<comment><USER2> Original article: <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6063/1669.abstract>

Long term memory formation presumably involves protein synthesis, which depends on a number of transcription factors and other molecules. Up until now the most studied transcription factor is CREB, which has been shown to enhance, inhibit, and direct memory in cells, depending on the manipulation. They now identify one gene, but it's not the only one; there's probably many other factors, proteins and second messengers involved. Similar results of npas4 knockout have been reported in the amygdala: [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023760)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if it is possible to make a drug that activates the Npas4 gene. A smart drug that would make you remember better could help old people. People who have great memory might more easily activate the Npas4 gene. Could this be measured?

<comment><USER4> Ever read _Flowers for Algernon_?

<comment><USER5> Read it? Hell, I live it every day. I just never know which half of the book it's going to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Off topic: I'm really happy that the pic is of a scientist who is _not_ in a white coat.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is a gene?

<comment><USER8> A gene is a molecular unit of heredity of a living organism. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene>)</comment></comment>


The Daala Video Codec: Research Update [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/daala-vp9summit-20140606.pdf <comment><USER2> Xiph needs to start a public prototyping playground that extends unpatented video and image codec research to create islands of techniques that are not patentable. They don't hav e to work, just be an idea.

Like if I said, "I'd like to use cellular automata and voronoi segmentation to do multiscale texture extraction and motion representation."

Someone else could possibly do a 500-1000 line python program that implemented something like that.

Create a 1000 of those ideas drop them into the public domain (we need something like the GPL for ideas) so that there is a large body of techniques and work that is unpatentable.

<comment><USER3> I'm afraid the existing body of software patents dictates not placing such ideas in the public domain, but rather as a form of "patent left" foundation that can force cross licensing access.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate? Why would putting the technologies in the public domain not work?

<comment><USER3> It would work for future patents, but I'm afraid it wouldn't work for future _software_ \-- the theory being that any non-trivial software will likely infringe on any number of patents. A collection of patents might help force cross-licensing, and so protect new (Free or not) software against existing patents (the assumption being that also holders of non-trivial software patents develop new software, and might infringe on one or more patents in the collection).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Monty links to his demo pages [1] at the end of the slides, with a good introduction to the codec if you are new to Daala (like I was.) Also, these demos are linked from the main xiph.org page as well [2]. There's more context and explanation there then in the slide deck ... I assume close what would you would get if you were actually at the talk. :)

[1] [https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/)

[2] [http://xiph.org/daala/](http://xiph.org/daala/)

</comment><comment><USER4> This caught my eye:

> Building a new codec from scratch may cost less than licensing

Samsung is already participating in many open source projects: F2FS, Tizen, they are part of Linux foundation, and I believe is even helping Mozilla with Servo. So why not try to get them to commit to adopting Daala in all of their devices as soon as it's stable and out, and perhaps even help with funding a bit? There might be other companies out there willing to do it, too. They need to reach to them.

<comment><USER6> Why would they do that? It's Samsung. They probably already have a "covers everything forever" license for the whole MPEG pool.

<comment><USER7> Something you may not know: Samsung had their own internal project to build a royalty-free codec, but they gave up because it was "too hard" (which for a large corporation usually means "costs too much"). The annual caps for H.264 are just low enough to discourage that kind of activity. The currently proposed caps for HEVC are much higher, and that may change the equation for some people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's no real guarantee that Daala won't be covered, at least partially by some submarine patents. I don't think you can work on a years long R&D effort and make that promise.

IMHO, you work on stuff with the assumption that if you're a big success, someone's gonna sue you, and plan for it accordingly.

In the meantime, HEVC is going to be widely deployed eventually. VP8 and VP9 are valid alternatives for some, and I see no reason not to support them while we wait years for a moonshot codec to save us. I have to wonder if there isn't some NIH fear that if VP8/9 get any degree of success it would make it that much harder to switch to Daala later.

That is, it's better to keep things in a "bad" state (H264/HEVC) because as the situation gets worse, it would be easier to justify Daala adoption later. Similar to how if you're waiting for Healthcare reform, and you want Single Payer, supporting a partial solution (e.g. health exchanges) might mitigate the worst pain, and make it harder to argue for Single Payer later.

<comment><USER7> > I have to wonder if there isn't some NIH fear that if VP8/9 get any degree > of success it would make it that much harder to switch to Daala later.

As the person who

A) leads the Daala project, and

B) made the decision to ship VP9 (a conversation that went approximately like this: My Boss: "Should we support VP9 in Firefox?" Me: "Yes. Duh."), and

C) has been fighting hard to make VP8 Mandatory To Implement for WebRTC...

I can tell you that nothing would make me happier than to see VP8 and VP9 be wildly successful. Hell, I'd've been ecstatic if we'd successfully managed to get H.264 Baseline made RF (there was an effort to do so a couple of years ago: it failed by 2 votes). See also OpenH264.

<comment><USER8> That's very good to hear, I retract my speculative accusation given in the absense of facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the end there is a request for niche areas that Daala could target. Here's my crazy idea:

Mozilla is adding webrtc into the browser, and I'm sure the basic case of video chat is being thought about. But another use case is screen sharing, and in particular sharing a web page. How much better/faster could a video encode be if you could feed it live information from the system that was drawing the page? e.g. knowing that nothing has changed without having to compare one picture to another, knowing that a certain area contains text, that another area contains a gradient, that another area is animated with a repeating animation or that the screen is being scrolled up/down at a certain speed,that the repeating background is composed of a specific repeating png, and so on.

No idea if that's a valid idea, but it's what popped into my head on reading the question.

<comment><USER7> With proper SIMD optimizations, the analysis to determine "nothing has changed" is so ridiculously fast that it's hard to compete even with direct XDamage output (or comparable things on other systems), whose data is not really in the format that an encoder wants.

Not saying there's no gains here, but people have proposed this idea before, and then given up on it after actually sitting down to implement it. It's also mostly an encoder optimization, and thus doesn't have much influence on the standard.

What's more interesting is adding special tools to the bitstream to represent things like text, which do not compress well with typical block transforms. This is certainly something we've spent some time thinking about, but there's no code committed for it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did anything else come out of this summit? I was trying to google info on it the other day and it was so invisible on the web I was beginning to doubt my recollection of the date that it was scheduled for.

It perhaps didn't help that someone just released a new gun model called VP9 which was filling up all the recent google results.

<comment><USER9> I'm only 20% through, but I thought I'd comment on the first section of "Don'ts". It's basically saying that Google's strategy with VP8/VP9 sucked. I don't agree. They took on a massive task and have had some small successes. It could have gone much worse. It reminds me a bit of those business books that look at firms that succeeded and cargo-cult everything they did or didn't do. But many of the factors that hold you back are random contingencies.

The big stumbling blocks for open web codecs are Microsoft/IE (on the desktop) and Apple/Safari (on mobile). VP8/VP9 has failed miserably on this score. But Opus, the amazing new audio codec developed by Xiph/Mozilla/IETF/etc. in the manner suggested by the "Do's" is also notably absent from iOS and IE, (the latter of which could be considered particularly galling since it was co- developed with Microsoft subsidiary Skype).

Not that I think multiple approaches isn't a good thing, and you've got to sell what you're doing. It just seems a bit negative when Google has VP8 shipping on Android (and Android seems like the only mobile OS likely to ship Opus any time soon too).

<comment><USER10> The thing is MS and Apple won't negotiate on any of this. They have never been involved with open standards and respectively pushed WMV and MOV formats instead.

You have to move forward under the presumption that neither will ever cooperate in a macroscopic sense, especially after Google caved and gave up making youtube webm based.

You still have to make the best solutions, and speak why they are the best, and hope everyone else will switch so that inevitably the dinosaurs do too. Because you can't reason with a trex.

<comment><USER11> > _especially after Google caved and gave up making youtube webm based_

They didn't remove h264 from Chrome, but when I watch videos on youtube, right click -> stats for nerds it lists the video as 'video/webm; codecs="vp9"'. That includes videos with ads, which didn't use to be the case.

<comment><USER9> Any idea when this happened? I only noticed a few days ago and there doesn't seem to be any official announcements or even blog posts about the switch.

I think they used to prompt you to install Flash if you didn't have it too, which it didn't seem to do earlier this week, just played adverts and content via HTML5/H.254 (in IE11) and HTML5/VP8 in Firefox.

After this the next step is probably to start delivering HTML5 in preference to FLash, where possible. Wonder what the plan is for that transition?

<comment><USER11> No, I hadn't noticed it until testing it for that comment (actually I didn't notice an ad started playing for the first video I clicked on and even the ad itself was webm), though I do feel like I've gotten almost all html5 videos for a while now (I have click to play on for plugins, so the ones that are ready to go stand out).

> _After this the next step is probably to start delivering HTML5 in > preference to FLash, where possible. Wonder what the plan is for that > transition?_

Notably, if you go to the html5 youtube page ([http://www.youtube.com/html5](http://www.youtube.com/html5)) in incognito mode in Chrome, it actually says "The HTML5 player is currently used when possible", so I assume this is the default now. That isn't the case in Firefox, where the option to request the html5 player to be the default is still there. Maybe it's a vp9 thing? I don't believe Firefox has included vp9 yet (and the player says: 'codecs="vp8.0, vorbis"')

<comment><USER9> Ah that's interesting. I actually opted out of HTML5 to see what would happen, but only in Firefox.

Firefox does have VP9, but it doesn't yet have the MSE (Media Source Extension) support that YouTube requires to deliver VP9, though a semi- functional version is available behind a preference in the nightly builds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Its hard problem making something unique enough to avoid current patents while still being a nice fit for a haäw pipeline. Things like överlappning transforms may end up creating new minimum values for the vertical context needed.

New itu/MPEG standards typically has lägre involvement from hw companies.

<comment><USER7> Memory bandwidth for the lapping isn't any worse than for a deblocking filter. The difference is that it's not adaptive.

<comment><USER12> HW decoders will not send the deblocking barrier to external memory (typically). Instead you will buffer the required rows until you have decoded the next line of macroblocks. As long as the filter margin are the same this will work fine in itself but you will not have done the buffering at the same place you did deblocking or any of the simpler overlap filters. In that way you will force larger changes to your architecture. Similarly your transform unit is likely not set up to handle this so it requires redesign. Getting to many of these hurdles in can be the death of adoption for the CODEC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Too bad they're not making this plain open source They should copyleft all the IP in this which will foster innovation on the algo instead of just basing this on customer needs Open algos are much easier to extend.

<comment><USER14> What are you talking about? Daala is as open as you get.

<comment><USER13> As I read it, they plan to patent new stuff. See page 9, the third bullet for example.

<comment><USER14> Read the fourth bullet: "Use a patent license that encourages adoption and discourages defection."

It sounds like they are planning on a copyleft-style defensive patent licensing system.

Right now, one of the big reasons that open codecs like VP8 and VP9 don't see wider adoption is that there's a lot of FUD thrown around by people saying "they might infringe H.264/HEVC patents, it's too risky to use them without a patent licensing pool."

By filing patents of their own, and offering them under a free (libre) license that has a clause causing it to be revoked if you engage in some other related patent litigation, this adds pressure against anyone trying to use their patents against someone using Daala.

Not sure how well this would work out in practice; I know that some people have gotten patents under these kinds of defensive open patent licenses before, but I don't know if they've ever been used defensively in practice before.

<comment><USER13> So you're saying in practice copyleft and hence open source doesn't really work, you have to patent and then license for free to protect your users. How does this impact innovation based on the ideas you have patented?

<comment><USER7> We've talked about making a GPLv3 release to at least open up the patents _we_ control to all copyleft software. But there are important details to work through, and like most FLOSS projects we have more things to do than people to do them, so it hasn't happened yet. If someone needed it to happen it should be a pretty easy conversation to have.

Keep in mind also, our goal is generally to stay out of court. See above about having too much to do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


YC Female founders conference wasn't about women in tech - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@pritianka/yc-female-founders-conference-wasn-t-about-women-in-tech-4aee00e10c9c

<comment><USER2> "And they happened to be all women. To me, that's diversity at its finest."

Nice conference and all, but a rather puzzling take on the concept of "diversity".

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point - I wasn't very clear. Often diversity is simplified to gender or race, etc. In my definition diversity means including people who look, think, act, work and study different. I expected YC to be unidimensional with this conference and have people who are exactly like their typical accelerator applicant - young, white males, working on very technical products and startups - except female, attend.

However, when I met the other attendees I saw that YC had transcended that uni-dimensional idea and brought in people from all walks of life, technical or not, local or not. I think that's a multi-layered definition of diversity. YC did a great job of expanding itself from "tech startup incubator" to a facilitator of dreams, technical or not, startuppy or not.

Does that make more sense?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> More importantly, it's not even really about women, at least from the presentations I saw. I.e. it's women sharing experiences and giving business advice, rather than giving business advice specifically _for women_. That's something a lot of similar events do, which might be useful to a limited extent, but I feel like more often than not it causes women to not get the same quality of advice that men get.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think I fully understand. Is your perspective that the presentations and advice were useful because the speakers were qualified? Or are you saying that because it was not targeted to women, the advice was not as helpful?

<comment><USER3> What I was trying to say is that when people host these types of events, a lot of them spend all of their time on issues that are specific to women (e.g. sexual harassment), rather than giving advice on how to be successful in business in general. So I was saying it's good to see events like this that don't fall into that trap.

E.g. in college I took a semester long class on women and entrepreneurship, and the entire class ended up being about issues like maternity leave and the glass ceiling. How to actually start a successful business never even came up. So while this kind of stuff is certainly important to know about, I can't help but feeling like for the vast majority of the students, who were female and for whom this was probably their first and maybe last exposure to entrepreneurship, that this was actually a huge disservice to them. And this is sort of a pattern that I've seen come up again and again.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. I totally agree with you! We need to focus on building and the how-tos on that rather than "problems women face". Too much discussion of the things that are wrong without a discussion of how to be a bad-ass despite them demotivates many people.

I once read an article about how bad the sexism is in the tech industry (particularly for startup founders) and it completely bummed me out. It didn't do me any good to hear of all the horrendous stories, it only demotivated me.

Luckily enough, our customers were busy emailing me about the product and various things and I had to snap out of it and get on with building my company :p</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why [programming] job postings always looking for "rockstars?" - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/51133/why-job-postings-always-looking-for-rockstars/61314#61314

<comment><USER2> rockstars = we don't have the money to pay for the rest of the band...</comment>


Mozilla: Microsoft bans Firefox on ARM-based Windows - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57431236-92/microsoft-bans-firefox-on-arm-based-windows-mozilla-says/ <comment><USER2> I'm getting really, really tired of the nonstop doucherocketry displayed by all the major tech corporations lately:

1\. Apple gratuitously locking down every last detail of their platform and cudgeling competitors with that control.

2\. Microsoft playing me-too to Apple as fast as their little brother legs can carry them.

3\. Oracle buying Java and going patent troll.

4\. Google basically lying about the reasons for their real names G+ policy and working hard to be the one ring that binds the net.

All of these companies produce some technically excellent products but I have to hold my nose to use any of them. The sad thing is, I think all of these companies could succeed solely on the strength of their work.

<comment><USER3> Re. 1 and 2, what exactly are Apple and Microsoft doing to their desktop OS to accomplish that? I'm not seeing any evidence of that happening at all.

<comment><USER4> On OSX, your program won't be allowed to use certain APIs unless you limit your program in other ways _and_ get Apple's explicit approval _and_ give Apple 30% of your gross revenue. e.g. <http://mjtsai.com/blog/2012/01/25/pdfpen-and-icloud/>

<comment><USER3> True, but those APIs were never available without those kinds of restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title of this story is highly misleading. MS have said since around september last year that if you want to target Windows on ARM specifically, then you have to write Metro style apps, using the new WinRT API. Existing desktop apps are not supported - you need to rewrite them. And this applies to all software developers, not just Mozilla/Firefox.

"The ARM version of Windows 8 will not support desktop applications. So if you want to write an app and you want it to work on any version of Windows then it has to be a Metro app." -- <http://stackoverflow.com/a/7426405/507950>

<comment><USER6> The issue is that Microsoft will not give access to the API's on ARM systems that are required to do this.

[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/05/firefox-...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/05/firefox- on-windows-o.html)

"Here's what's going on. For Windows on X86, Microsoft is giving other browsers basically the same privileges it gives IE. It's not great that you don't get those privileges (certain API access) unless you're the default browser and I think that's deeply unfair (a post for later,) but at least we're able to build a competitive browser and ship it to Windows users on x86 chips.

 _But on ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won't give to other browsers_ so there's no way another browser can possibly compete with IE in terms of features or performance.

This is in direct violation of the promises they made to developers, users, and OEMs about browser choice in documents which mysteriously disappeared from Microsoft's site -- remember this? I sure do."

<comment><USER5> Okay, didn't know that - that sounds nuts on microsoft's part.

<comment><USER6> It's a strange move - no Chrome and Firefox is a big turn-off for me.

<comment><USER5> Yeah having a decent choice of browsers is important.. Android would probably be leading the way so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is incorrect. Apple doesn't bar loading webpages with anything other their own webkit. What they bar is interpreting code that isn't included with the app except inside the include webkit with the system. This is how opera mobile works on the iPhone (all external javascript executed server side and the dom is rendered locally on the device)

There is a clear difference between downloading and opening documents vs downloading and executing code in Apple's book. (If it's turing complete basically). They just don't want you downloading new functionality into the app without them getting to test it and approve it.

It's just really hard to write a web browser that doesn't use javascript. You might be able to hide a little UIWebView off somewhere executing the downloaded javascript but something about violating the spirt of the rule makes me think Apple might still say no.

Long long ago Apple didn't even allow other webkit based browsers. They loosened up to apps replicating built in features though over time.

Now Microsoft's rule is a little different. It's worse even. They just seem to want other browsers either way.

<comment><AUTHOR> > They just don't want you downloading new functionality into the app without > them getting to test it and approve it.

This sounds a little foggy to me. Why _exactly_ wouldn't they want that? What _exact_ kind of harmful functionality would they not be able to predict a third party JavaScript engine be able to cause, that webkit cannot?

I'm not convinced that this isn't just another excuse to stop competition. Similar to the whole, amazon cannot sell ebooks "for the good of our users" rule.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure that stopping competition isn't a drawback from Apple's perspective, but the official reason is that they don't want developers doing an end run around their app store to get code on the device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this might be the end to the open web.

It's clear that more and more people will use devices like iPads

So when both Msft and Apple ban other browsers and their app stores are making a ton of money for them. The next logical step would be to make even more money from the app stores and slowly drop support for the browsers to do this.

I hope that Chrome OS takes off. I wish that Google and Facebook would team up together on this and make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the reminder Microsoft. I was starting to feel some sympathy for you.

</comment><comment><USER11> To me, this isn't about microsoft vs. Mozilla. This is about proprietary companies vs. open source companies. Open source is all good, but nearly all of the machines we use to access that open source software is run on proprietary company hardware/software. If apple or microsoft decided one day to bar other OS' from being installed on their systems, well tough shit. Until the people make a movement to make them feel their mistakes, proprietary companies are gonna continue doing whatever they fuck they want.

</comment><comment><USER12> The number of ARM-based Windows machines must be miniscule.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, for an operating system that hasn't been released yet they're really not selling very well. Oh, wait.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, I was suggesting that it's extremely unlikely it'll ever gain any traction when it is released.

People don't want windows running their tablet/phone/media center.

<comment><USER14> That might be true if by "People" you are reffering to you.

<comment><USER12> Can you cite some figures? I don't know anyone that has purchased a windows phone or tablet.

For example [http://blogs.computerworld.com/19966/windows_phone_market_sh...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/19966/windows_phone_market_share_is_so_small_nielsen_doesnt_even_list_it)

(Windows phone market share is so small, Nielsen don't list it separately).

<comment><USER15> Tech pundits are not very good windsocks for what people actually want. Remember the launch of the iPod? The iPhone? The iPad? Android? All were predicted to imminent doom. It's especially hard when salesmen are telling people what they want.

For the record, my name is Freeman. You now know someone who owns a Windows Phone. And when I bought it last year, the salesman at AT&T flat out refused to sell it to me until I called a manager, convinced I was making a huge mistake.

And of course you don't know anyone who has purchased a Windows tablet.

<comment><USER12> It's not a tech pundit, it's market data.

Yes, maybe after 10+ years of having negligable market share Microsoft will suddenly pull something awesome out of the bag and people will suddenly forget about the horrible experience of using Windows on the desktop, and start wanting that on their other devices.

But I doubt it. The most surprising thing about this story is that mozilla care about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What, a Microsoft vs. Netscape war? Impossible!

</comment><comment><USER17> Hmm. With the whole mobile web basically coded for a version of webkit or other - the real question is will people with Windows ARM tablets see their websites broken like they do when using Windows Phone 7x?

That'd be bad for Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER18> thankyou for spamming hacker news with a rehash of a previous article

</comment><comment><USER19> I am not holding my breath to see the following posts:

1) Mozilla complaining about not being able to run Firefox on iOS or on Chromebooks even though the situation is exactly the same as with Windows RT.

2) IE team complaining that Firefox is the only browser allowed by Mozilla on Boot2Gecko.

<comment><USER20> Firefox isn't the only browser allowed by Mozilla on Boot2Gecko. Not only would that be permissible in our web store (as far as I'm aware), but you could freely distribute it on your own without having to jump through hoops. That is one of the points of the project, and is very much by design. If the IE team wants to build a new browser for B2G, I'd love to see it!

(Disclosure: I'm a B2G team member but these are my views, etc etc...)

<comment><USER21> Daeken, I thought the only thing users could download to their B2G phones were _web_ applications. There is zero support for native apps, like alternative browsers, right?

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I'm struggling to see how a browser could possibly be implemented in another browser and expect to have competitive performance. Especially when Gecko will be running native code, and any other browser would not be.

<comment><USER22> He meant that anyone is free to take the B2G source code and modify it to boot into another browser.

<comment><USER23> So the answer is, basically, "No, you can't."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> stop whining mozilla, create your own os and make your own rules...or go pursue chrome os, they don't allow ff as well.

<comment><USER25> Yes, Mozilla is doing B2G. This does not excuse MS doing this.

<comment><USER26> It'd be awesome if Microsoft then complains about how people can't run IE on B2G. Not that that's ever going to happen.

<comment><USER27> Given that IE hasn't run on anything other than Windows since version 5 (when it ran on Solaris, HP-UX, Xenix, and, I've heard Linux as well - up to 5.5 on Mac OS), I'd say they probably don't have any plans for it.

<comment><USER28> Not natively, though IE6 ran on Linux via WINE. The "ies4linux" script actually made the experience only slightly nauseating.

Useful for those who found themselves trapped on corporate Intranets based on MSIE-only apps.

<comment><USER27> No, I'm talking about native ports.

Though IE8 and possibly IE9 work in Wine, yes, that's not what I meant. I meant that Microsoft was actively developing and supporting native ports of IE 3 through 5 on Solaris, HP-UX, Xenix, and maybe possibly Linux (I couldn't find evidence, but I remember seeing something about it.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia's Bitcoin Article Traffic Stats - <AUTHOR> http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Bitcoin <comment><AUTHOR> Homework: Overlay with Bitcoin price in USD to compare/contrast recent behaviour.</comment>


Engineering Requires More Science - <AUTHOR> http://diego-pacheco.blogspot.com/2020/03/engineering-requires-more-science.html <comment><USER2> Most engineering probably just requires more actual engineering. Too many people with "engineer" in their title have had little to no exposure to what engineering is. Especially software where we think we've done engineering because we have automated tests. Its a mindset. And science isn't some optional extra either.

So "more science" implies something more to add, when it was probably something removed, diminished or more likely: never properly included to start with.</comment>


Full Stack Engineer Wanted for ECommerce Solution - <AUTHOR> THE ROLE We are hiring engineers to help us build out our existing product and app integrations.
Your role will be to work with our Lead Engineer to improve the current customer dashboard, build out app integrations with eCommerce platforms and marketplaces, as well as fix the backlog of issues. TECH SKILLS REQUIRED AngularJS (v1.5) Bootstrap LESS Socket.io Gulp REST API interactions
QUALITIES
You are a full-stack generalist with deep experience building web applications. Comfortable working with everything from CSS and CoffeeScript to databases and API design. Excited to move fast and know how to prioritise and make critical decisions. Unafraid to own your mistakes and directly support users. Passionate beyond just being an engineer Knowledgeable enough about how the web works to decide implementation tradeoffs correctly. Have exceptional communication skills to convey complex ideas to non-technical people
A PLUS IF…. You have started something on your own before; a startup, an open-source project, something else. You have experience with Computer Vision / Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence
Experience scaling engineering teams
HOW TO APPLY We are not big on resumes so please make sure you've done some research about us and signed up to try the product at pixc.com. Then, email your details to firstname.lastname@example.com … and include the following... - Why you find Pixc interesting;
- Why you'd be a good fit;
- Which eCommerce technology do you admire and why
Salary based on experience. <comment><USER2> Job solicitations are probably better suited for the monthly "whoishiring" threads. They are automatically posted 11AM Eastern time the first weekday of each month. The next one will be Thursday, June 1</comment>


Beyond hot desk communism - <AUTHOR> http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0010-beyond-hot-desk-communism.html <comment><USER2> Do any workplaces model themselves after university campuses? In essence, creating a wide variety of spaces to accommodate myriad working styles.

Lower floors of a library for solitude, campus coffee shops for more social or creative tasks. A myriad of rooms and open spaces for ad hoc collaboration. Outdoor areas with tables and benches. Lounges. Departmental enclaves with desks and storage when you need a more persistent environment.

It feels like my productivity plummeted once I graduated and landed in a cubicle.

<comment><USER3> I blogged about this once in more detail (like you care), but I think workplaces would benefit greatly if they had zones that were analogous to those found in houses.

      House                   Office
      Bedroom/office/study    Private Office
      Dining Room             Small team collaboration spaces
      Living Room             Common lounge
      Backyard/family room    Whole company meeting room/auditorium

People stay in their bedroom/study when they want privacy and the ability to concentrate. They hang out in living rooms and dining rooms when they want to see other people. When you have all your friends over, you most likely spend your time in the kitchen/family room/backyard. I don't see why your workplace should only have semi-private personal zones (bedrooms) or a single huge room (family room). No family would like a house with only bedrooms or only a family room, so why should employees like a workplace with only one type of room?

<comment><USER4> Sounds like Joel's description of the Fog Creek office space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i found it suuuuper hard to concentrate when i worked in an 'open cube' layout. i can only imagine that losing more space becomes stressful, like trying to find routine and focus while working out of coffee shops. it's surprisingly difficult!

the past few months i've been working from home with my husband on a joint venture. we both appreciate the flexibility of interaction levels, from working in separate rooms to putting our heads together.

i think i'm not alone in this need for concentration and chill, while still appreciating the benefits of neighbor nudging.

the whole interaction thing is of course much easier with just two people, but i think having flexibility of space and schedule is what makes us successful. and respect. nothing like working with your significant other to truly learn communication skills.

</comment><comment><USER6> You should rethink everything if you cannot provide those people personal offices who absolutely must be at the office every day.

One thing you're probably doing wrong then is thinking that everyone should be physically there every day.

<comment><USER7> That's one thing I'm hoping to get out of this recession. The archaic notion that everyone must commute large distances, at great expense to themselves only to cram like fish in a can into a small expensive space called an "office" should get a rethink.

The central office should, hopefully, stop being the defacto standard for all employees and instead be used carefully for those who need the collaborative environment most, when they need it most. It should be set up explicitly to serve this purpose. At a certain population/productivity density, everyone going to the office every day might be economically unsustainable.

Unfortunately, the places I've worked have taught me that some older folks are going to need to retire before we can get past the notion that any time spent not physically at the office is _vacation_.

<comment><USER8> The trouble is, if you're unmotivated and your results aren't visible, time spent out of the office usually is vacation.

<comment><AUTHOR> The solution to that is to not hire unmotivated, invisible workers, I'd say....

<comment><USER8> Thoroughly agree!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's an interesting piece and it's made me think a bit. One potential drawback: People historically never respect shared space as much as they do personal space. Regardless of the general maturity level, damage/uncleanliness of shared space is always going to be higher than in dedicated personal space. Part of this is because just one or two messy people will gradually mess the whole area, instead of being contained to their own area.

But being more flexible on office setup, and minimizing empty desks when costs are tough - really fascinating stuff. I'm going to roll this around in my mind more a bit later.

</comment><comment> cool-RR This article presents a new idea for optimizing dense work environments. A person might find this idea interesting if his business is managing low- productivity workers. In my opinion, the money saved by this scheme will be negligible for employees who create even a modest amount of wealth.

</comment><comment><USER10> I still think that proper, individual desks are better.

<comment><USER11> It's easy to quantify, or should be. When a developer comes in in the morning, he or she has to recreate in their own mind the state that existed there when they left the previous evening before they can continue working. Does being able to leave books/notes/printouts open on the desk and windows open on the desktop make this process faster or slower? How much cash is an extra hour spent getting ready instead of doing actual work in the morning worth to the company?

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree... and so does the article.

Hot desking doesn't work for software engineering any more than it works for architecture. The article proposes an alternative to that, which is personal desk space on a "continuous" desk so that your space expands and contracts as your needs do.</comment></comment></comment>


Hot Take: Stop Donation Shaming Public Figures for Giving Money to Worthy Causes - <AUTHOR> https://silentdonor.com/stop-donation-shaming-public-figures/ <comment><USER2> Because then people think it's a good thing. Have a system to tax people appropriately, and you never need donations.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is still clearly a good thing. Even by your own account - until the tax system is taxing "people appropriately", this is the way that wealthy donors give back. I think you and many people who share your opinion have a distaste for the current way taxes are levied, but that distaste should not manifest itself in shaming public donors for giving back.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Peeqo –– A smart robot that only responds in gifs - <AUTHOR> http://peeqo.com/
This was a project posted on Reddit (r/DIY). The full album is at: https://imgur.com/a/ue4Ax
I'm not the maker, but was given permission since he/she didn't have enough points to submit posts here. <comment><USER2> hey this is the maker! feel free to ask any questions

<comment><USER3> Hey! This is an absolutely amazing project. I'm curious what your background and "day job" (if you have one) is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is he/she going to do a kickstarter for it?

<comment><USER2> maybe:)</comment></comment>


CMU's Introduction to Machine Learning Course - <AUTHOR> http://alex.smola.org/teaching/cmu2013-10-701x/index.html <comment><USER2> I just showed this link to three classmates who are currently taking the course, and the common reaction was "It's a trap!"

They haven't been very satisfied with it. It's co-taught by two professors, one who teaches like it's an introduction for people who have never heard of Bayes' theorem and one who teaches like it's a graduate seminar for people who've seen it all before.

<comment><USER3> As someone who has never heard of Bayes theorem, is this good or bad? So some things would be explained well and other things over my head?

<comment><USER2> Right. Some things would be explained from the basics, and some topics would be covered by referring you to obscure papers on advanced techniques in machine learning published by the professors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I also recommend videos and lecture notes by Tom Mitchell for the same course taught in 2011[1]. His explanation to some non-trivial theoretical concepts of ML is very coherent.

[1] [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/10701_sp11/](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/10701_sp11/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I did the Stanford free online one the first time it was offered a year or so back. Was perfect -- didn't move at a blazing pace and was very lean. Great instructor, highly recommended (though I think it may have been absorbed into Coursera?).

<comment><USER6> If you liked the ML Coursera class, Ng also has an introduction to deep- learning in more or less the same casual explicit style.

[1]: Wiki with code, exercises and explanation

[2]: Video lecture one with a recap on backprop

[3]: Video lecture two on Sparse Auto Encoders

[4]: Handouts

[1]: [http://deeplearning.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutori...](http://deeplearning.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial)

[2]: [http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/video1.html](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/video1.html)

[3]: [http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/video2.html](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/video2.html)

[4]: [http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/handouts.html](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/handouts.html)

<comment><USER5> awesome he is a real pleasant & organized teacher for this kindof stuff I will definitely take a look

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For comparison, here is MIT 9.520:

Statistical Learning Theory and Applications [http://www.mit.edu/~9.520/](http://www.mit.edu/~9.520/)

I think it is interesting how different ML courses can have such different emphasis in content. The MIT course is all about regularization.

<comment><USER8> I'm taking this class right now and it is certainly an interesting twist on the topic - its fun to see how many different ML techniques solve variants of a single base problem that you can analyze with statistical learning theory. Also: how many different regularizations are equivalent, and how some "intuitive", ad-hoc-seem-to-work regularizations you might think up in isolation actually can be theoretically justified. It contrasts with the more traditional, also grad-level 6.867 ML class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You may want to look at the self-evaluation, a qualification exam for understanding the material:

[http://alex.smola.org/teaching/cmu2013-10-701x/slides/Intro_...](http://alex.smola.org/teaching/cmu2013-10-701x/slides/Intro_ML_Self_Evaluation.pdf)

It would have been a piece of cake in college, but I have not used that math in a long time :-/

</comment><comment><USER10> Gee, guys, looking at the list of topics, a huge fraction, likely over 50%, of the material goes back to programs in operations research, statistics, and the mathematical sciences from about 1970 on. Nearly the only thing new is the collection of sample applications. From what I've seen, the quality of the content of the current ML courses is way below that going back to 1970.

Warning: History shows that the US economy looked at the material in operations research, statistics, and the mathematical sciences and rolled their eyes, did a big upchuck, laughed, turned, and walked away. One might look for alarms from their hype and fad detectors.

<comment><USER11> a good machine learning course might indeed cover 1940-1980s operations research (nonlinear optimization, linear/quadratic programming, dynamic programming), and statistics from 1970-1990s (graphical models, markov chain monte carlo methods, measures of model capacity). i'd say the field borrows the most useful bits from these fields and finds good honest use in many real life problems today. and i agree that there's a lot of unwarranted hype that leads to a lot of well-deserved skepticism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That is not the intro course. This is [http://curtis.ml.cmu.edu/w/courses/index.php/Machine_Learnin...](http://curtis.ml.cmu.edu/w/courses/index.php/Machine_Learning_10-601_in_Fall_2013)

</comment><comment><USER13> How is this course compared to Andrew Ng's Coursera class, his regular Stanford class and Caltech's Learning from Data course? (Other ML courses available on the web in terms of depth)

<comment><USER14> I will say that I'm a huge fan of the Caltech Learning from Data course (currently also offered on EdX). I took Andrew Ng's Coursera course 2 years ago, finished it successfully, and liked it. But I feel that the Caltech course gave me a much deeper foundational understanding of the basic issues and tradeoffs, and much deeper insight into what's going on.

Homework is much better in the Caltech course, too. In the Coursera course, they give you programs and environments in Octave that are all prewritten for you, and you just need to plug in a few key lines (often there's essentially one way to do it due to dimensionality). You feel like you understand what's going on, but the understanding is not really grounded. The Caltech course has multiple choice questions, but they look like this: "implement this algorithm, run it through a data set chosen randomly with such and such parameters, calculate learning error, do all this 1000 times and average. What value out of these 5 is your learning error closest to?". You choose the language, you implement the algorithm from scratch, you debug the hell out of it, you visualize your data to understand what's wrong... then the knowledge and the understanding stay with you.

<comment><USER15> I'll second that.

I'm currently doing both the Coursera course and the Caltech course concurrently. I really like the level and delivery style of the Caltech course. It covers a lot of material, with good depth and rigour where needed and with a lot of colour. Makes you want to jump and try the techniques out.

In contrast the Coursera course seems a bit easy and dry. I also dislike the dependency on Octave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think now it is the time we get some tutorial/resources/classes on practical implementation of these ML techniques. Enough of Introduction to ML. How to handle large data (say 6000000 rows), how to convert csv/tbv data to different formats needed for different machine learning libraries for e.g. Weka, LibSVM etc.

<comment><USER17> For an introduction to the broader realm of data input, normalization, modeling, and visualization -- in which ML plays but a part -- you can "preview" Bill Howe's "Introduction to Data Science" class on Coursera[0]; I'm working through the lectures, and I find he gives compelling explanations of what all these parts are, why they're important, and how it all fits together in a larger context.

[0] [https://www.coursera.org/course/datasci](https://www.coursera.org/course/datasci)

<comment><USER18> I took Prof. Howe's course on Coursera and it's a bit of a mixed bag. I can actually see it being better in some respects just going through the content after-the-fact than taking the course as it was run as there were a number of issues with auto-grading of assignments and some of the specific tools choices (like Tableau, which only runs on Windows).

That said, the course covered a lot of ground and touched on a number of different interesting/important topics. Some of the lecture material was a bit disorganized/had errors and didn't flow all that well from one topic to another but there was a lot of good material there, especially if you had enough background to appreciate it. I was comfortable enough but it was obvious that the expectations set by the prereqs were off.

Hopefully the course will run again with most of the kinks worked out and, perhaps, a better level-setting of what's needed to get the most out of the course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's worth noting that very many CMU courses, from all departments, have notes available on a publiclly-accessable course website.

Source: Am a CMU 2012 grad.

<comment><USER20> I think you meant noting* ... haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> All I can say:

1971–75: DARPA's frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at Carnegie Mellon University

</comment><comment><USER22> Unless it is blackboard with chalk, its no fun following online. That's why MIT's lectures rock!

<comment><USER23> Yes! I've done quite a few online courses now and the ones I've enjoyed the most have all been ones that were essentially recordings of the normal classes students take on campus.

In the case of Harvard's CS50x, it was essentially the exact same course. (Plus it helped that David Malan is an outstanding teacher.)</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple, free cloud script hosting service - <AUTHOR> https://waterdeep.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News, I've sometimes had the need for a place to host my bash aliases, React components templates and other scripts that I want to have quick access to so I decided to create a free service for this, Waterdeep. I will appreciate all the feedback you guys might have for me in regards of the website itself or what's lacking.

<comment><USER2> Good work. BTW, why can't you save it in Github or even Google drive? Am i missing anything!?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question!

The idea is to just have a very quick 1 click way to find scripts that you have, Google Drive is more of a general purpose storage, this is specifically for scripts and optimized for that.

To list a situation where Waterdeep could be easier to use:

When you have a temporary file you might need but is messing up your git flow, you can just store it at Waterdeep and access it later or delete it. If you want to do the same with Google Drive, you'd have to create that file inside a folder which can be hard to find.

For the case of GitHub, you can easily have your own scripts there and it would work fine, Waterdeep is more so focused on extremely fast access to your scripts without having to create a repository and commit/push the files to it, which I understand it pretty straight forward to do for most developers yet that friction might be the reason why most of them don't have a dotfiles repository on their GitHub account.

<comment><USER3> This sounds really great. I'm on my phone so I haven't signed up, but I plan to when I get to my desktop.

Are these files public, or private? A great thing about GitHub gist's is that being public I can just wget them whenever I need them.

Is there a command line tool for uploading? (or an api for others to build one?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Now you can wget the raw files! They are now public at for example: [https://raw.waterdeep.io/tazard/myfile.py](https://raw.waterdeep.io/tazard/myfile.py), feel free to check it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally i wouldn't sign up to a site without knowing what I'll get from doing that. A bit more details what you are offering wont hurt

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a very simple product to just upload text files and have very quick access to them, what you'll get is just that. Imagine Github's gist but easier to use and optimized for quick access to text files.

If you often have temporary scripts that you want to save somewhere, this might be a place where you can store them.

If you have aliases in a dotfile that you might want to have quick access to when on a new computer, this could be helpful too.

<comment><USER5> I think di0x74 is saying you should include these value props somewhere a new user might see it to encourage them to create an account and try your service :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why the name waterdeep? Curious

<comment><AUTHOR> I just thought it's cool sounding, there's no real reason behind it.</comment></comment>


Julia for Numerical Computation in MIT Courses - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stevengj/julia-mit/

<comment><USER2> > Traditionally, these sorts of courses at MIT have used Matlab

This is an incredibly good sign for hobbyists in a number of fields where Matlab completely dominates the research end of the spectrum. In the DSP realm the amount of experimental software that relies on Matlab and the number of research publications that pack in Matlab implementations is enough to be a pain in the side for anyone outside of an institution where Matlab licenses are taken for granted. Hopefully it will become a trend.

<comment><USER3> Octave?

<comment><USER4> Octave is close enough to Matlab to have inherited most of its flaws, yet not close enough to be a complete drop-in replacement. Julia, while obviously inspired by Matlab, is not attempting any sort of comparability, and thus can fix flaws and be a better language.

Octave, in my opinion, should be relegated to (trying to) run legacy Matlab code, while Julia or Numpy should be the first choice for any new code.

<comment><USER5> > Octave, in my opinion, should be relegated to (trying to) run legacy Matlab > code, while Julia or Numpy should be the first choice for any new code.

Octave dev here. I agree.

Every time I have to implement yet another idiocy of the Matlab language, I die a little inside. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

<comment><USER6> Come work on a modern functional language!

<comment><USER5> You mean mathics? Perhaps. I don't know how important it is to liberate mathematica code. It doesn't seem to have the deployment that Matlab has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I tried to get into Julia, but I was put off when it seemed that the language doesn't support vectorization the way that Matlab does, but rather encourages writing your loops explicitly (which is fast due to the LLVM JITC). Yuck.

I am an Octave / Matlab fan myself, and think that Julia/ Python/ R/ etc don't quite hit the sweet spot for matrix driven algorithms and 100-1000 line programs that Matlab does. Call me old fashioned....

<comment><USER8> Julia does support vectorization just like MATLAB, but I think what you may be referring to are some of the speed traps that currently exists where undesireable/unnecessary copies occur. This is often in practice the reason that writing devectorized code is better in Julia right now.

But, this issue is well-identified in the Julia dev community, and is on the roadmap for 0.3: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/4853](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/4853)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a strange choice to me, the only reason for choosing Julia seems to be for speed but when doing any of these courses I can't see speed being much of an issue but rather the ability to leverage existing code and help available online and offline to learn the core mechanics of numerical programming.

In my opinion Julia is great but still a bit immature.

<comment><USER10> It may indeed be a strange choice, but I think there are many reasons for why one might try Julia beyond the speed aspect. The main one for me (and I think the language designs also state something to this effect) is the language wide paradigm of multiple dispatch on parametric types. Coming originally from a C/Fortran old school numerical computing background, it seems to me that many of the best numerical software (your lapacks,fftws, and whatnot) eventually end up at a point where you have a flat collection of a bunch of foo functions with some protocol over the function suffixes and signatures, so that you can can get at an optimized foo_* at the bottom level with a uniform interface through a top level foo at the level of granularity of basic fooness as understood by end users. Julia formalizes this structure, which is I think part of how it achieves speed, but more importantly allows people to focus on programming to the essential abstraction and adding in methods to optimize or specialize after the fact.

<comment><USER11> I love this post – you really get it :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A question: are you getting good performance from Julia? I've seen posts that say so, but my code that does Monte Carlo simulation (both vectorized and devectorized) seem to be very very slow compared to Matlab or Numpy.

<comment><USER4> I've been testing Julia on and off for the past few month (rewriting various bits of real world numpy code I've written for work) and I've seen everything from 2 times slowdown to 20 times speedup when compared to numpy. Most of the time I'm not seeing much more than 2 times speedup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hehe. Get them while they're young.

I'll have to take a look see through this and write out the analogous code with my Numerical Haskell libs after the holiday season to compare.

<comment><USER14> Please do! I've been keeping an eye out for a post from you on the haskell subreddit announcing some work.

I have some ideas for some numerical code in Haskell, but I keep coming back to numpy/julia/matlab for my day-to-day.

<comment><USER13> You could also subscribe to the mailing list I have setup on my website at WellPosed.com, though I will cross post to reddit and Haskell cafe once it's released (will be pre Alpha quality mind you). I'm aiming for sometime after Xmas or around New Years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So is Julia intended to be a general purpose language? I keep hearing about it only in the context of numerical computation.

<comment><USER16> It started as a language targeted for numerical computation.

But as usual, many developers resist to "use the best tool for the job" instead of "a language to rule them all", and Julia is now starting to have libs for everything.

Not that is bad, quite the contrary. The language is quite nice and already achieves C like speedups for many of its features.

So I can easily see it getting a place in the mainstream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why is the IPython and scientific package installation always such a nightmare?

<comment><USER15> Because some people like to use operating systems that don't have software installation and maintenance figured out.

        apt-get install ipython

Done.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't solve the problem. Here's another version:

Why is installing a specific version of a package you fancy (e.g the latest or some previous) a nightmare?

And there "apt-get" doesn't help you much.

<comment><USER19>
        pip install mypackage==1.2.3

I believe the general formula is apt-get for python and python-pip, then use pip for everything past that point.

And in general, virtualenvs are the right way to go for anything other than throwaway scripts. I've got a global numpy/scipy/requests install so that I can just do `ipython -pylab` and start getting work done. But real project code happens in a virtualenv.

On a mac anaconda works pretty well. I sent a link to a marketer with minimal python experience and she was up and running in under an hour. (Admittedly, she's rather more adept than a normal marketer...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> hm... why teach Julia, if everything (90%) in numerical/scientific community is Fortran/C(++) ?

<comment><USER4> Far from 90% of code written in the numerical world is Fortran/C. And even the code that end up being written in Fortran almost always starts its life in something like MATLAB or Python. Only after all the kinks have been worked out and all the bottle necks identified might some of the code be ported to Fortran or C. And even in those cases it often only makes sense to rewrite the most critical 10%-20% of the code.

<comment><USER21> Agree with the above.

In addition, all of these higher level languages popular in science seem to have pretty good support for calling existing C/Fortran libs when necessary. Julia is no exception, which makes it possible to take advantage of all the work that's been done developing optimized numerical codes.

That said, I would like to see something more automatic. In my limited experience, Julia's ccall works as advertised, but f2py in Python is much simpler to use.</comment></comment></comment>


Examples to compare OCR services: Amazon vs. Google vs. Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://www.amplenote.com/blog/2019_examples_amazon_textract_rekognition_microsoft_cognitive_services_google_vision <comment><USER2> One of the things that Textract purports to do is also detect structured data, e.g. if the scanned images has tables, like a spreadsheet.

I tested it out when it became available to the general public, and included the API call and JSON response for their default and relatively simple example:

[https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/1a71c8fb98ddd1df6abdc08bc7...](https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/1a71c8fb98ddd1df6abdc08bc746397a)

I tried it against what I consider one of the harder real-world types of scanned tabular data, a Senate personal financial disclosure form [0], and it didn't do great. In fact, I found that it did substantially worse than ABBYY FineReader. Or rather, ABBYY did much better than I would've expected for any software, even managing to read the vertically-oriented column headers accurately [1].

[0] [https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/1a71c8fb98ddd1df6abdc08bc7...](https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/1a71c8fb98ddd1df6abdc08bc746397a#is- textract-our-saint-and-savior-of-pdf-to-csv-data)

[1] [https://github.com/dannguyen/abbyy-finereader-ocr- senate#les...](https://github.com/dannguyen/abbyy-finereader-ocr-senate#less- simple-table)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was hoping that they had taken the time to test tables, nested tables, and irregular table rows with headers every so often.

A good example of what I'm talking about are invoices. In my line of work we extract data from thousands of different types of invoices that are the only place to find key data from your services provider (waste & recycling bills, soon other parts of a building's expenses), and normalize that information.

There is a long-tail of industries that are years away from having an API to transact information…but that information is available on their monthly statements in some sort of crazy table format!

In my experience Amazon Textract has been the best in terms of processing speed, ease of use, and table extraction accuracy. However post processing is almost always needed with any OCR implementation.

Edit: Its important to note that Microsoft and Google don't even support table extraction in the APIs listed in this article!

<comment><USER4> Azure has a separate service to read forms and formatted docs. [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive- service...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive- services/form-recognizer/)

<comment><USER5> Do you know how good it is? I have a LOT of structured documents that I need to OCR.

<comment><USER6> MSFT person here - give it a try! sign up, and you get a free trial that can allow you to easily benchmark.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. That is actually something I've been looking for and I do have a msdn sub.

fyi that defaulted to indian rupee as default currency for me (UK based & zero indian connections). Weird

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe compare to some of the free-non-hosted options?

Like where are we with OCR? Last I checked it was CTC magic. Any progress?

<comment><USER9> Tesseract[0] is the classic example. There's a bunch of advice for improving your accuracy with it, like making your images larger (literally just scale it up x2 or x4).

It would be interesting to the benchmark from the article repeated with different scaling options (or other preprocessing, depending on platform).

[0]: [https://github.com/tesseract- ocr/tesseract](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract)

<comment><USER10> Running tesseract (4.0.0 using the LSTM engine) on the same images leaves a lot to be desired for handwriting, but does well on the (non-handwriting) website image (the source images are linked in the "OCR Image Processing Results" section).

<comment><USER11> From the Tesseract FAQ:

"Can I use Tesseract for handwriting recognition?

You can, but it won't work very well, as Tesseract is designed for printed text. Look for projects focused on handwriting recognition."

[https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/FAQ#can-i- us...](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/FAQ#can-i-use- tesseract-for-handwriting-recognition)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would have been nice to see % accuracy as well as or instead of just % words matched. It seems like the author decided to forego false positives.

You can train models that are good at finding words in images but can have terrible accuracy at perceiving the actual text of the word.

<comment><USER11> Typically OCR accuracy is measured in two ways, CER (Character error rate) and WER (Word error rate). If just one number is provided, it's typically CER.

"Finding words in images" is a bit ambiguous. It can mean "word spotting" (intended for retrieval rather than transcription) but also "text segmentation" (part of preprocessing step before OCR).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They tested a single image of each type. :/

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if some implementations just use nearest neighbour words to increase accuracy in the common case of normal text. - Decreasing performance on random strings considerably.

The tested corpus only contains relatively common words, so this aspect is not tested.

<comment><USER10> Have a specific image you'd be interested in seeing tested? The article only contains a few examples that could be freely used, but images with sparse random text (e.g. [1]) do tend to have good results across all the services.

[1] [https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ken-griffey- jr...](https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ken-griffey-jr-of-the- seattle-mariners-makes-a-hit-during-news-photo/91124776)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dang, I was hoping to see a comparison to ABBYY's FineReader Online in there: [https://finereaderonline.com](https://finereaderonline.com) Maybe in the 2020 review?

<comment><USER10> I tried running the source images through FineReader Online, but the images with handwriting resulted in "was not processed: the recognized document contains errors". The website image worked, but was missing a few elements, like the other headings on the line with "Minimalist editor".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice! I did the same thing for ASR technologies a while back. Results here. [https://drive.google.com/a/bolcer.org/file/d/1CJTHikHldMYTMv...](https://drive.google.com/a/bolcer.org/file/d/1CJTHikHldMYTMvhDsfx7dr- IXUTrlp-8/view?usp=drivesdk) (methodology: same parts of speech analysis on exact transcripts ran through different services).

All OCR services, BTW, have the same threading problem. They work really well for sequential text, but as soon as you start getting into more complicated "marketing" formats, they don't work at all.

They best use of the online OCR services I found was figuring out published dates for news articles that typically don't show up in anything other than images. Even w/ both Azure, AWS, and Google, I still needed a post-capture regex to figure the stuff out. [https://drive.google.com/a/bolcer.org/file/d/16vujemgD91Ebuu...](https://drive.google.com/a/bolcer.org/file/d/16vujemgD91EbuuI98KCXjUuIGHBGR_3e/view?usp=drivesdk)

We've got a long ways to go.

</comment><comment><USER17> Once a year when I do my taxes I go through every single bank transaction and classify it into a proper column in a spreadsheet. The problem is that my bank provides CSV transaction data for the past 6 months only. But it does provide years of bank statements in PDF format.

I decided I can save a lot of time by using Amazon Textract to extract the tables from the PDF's and convert them to CSV files.

The problem is that while Textract works really well for well defined tabular data it does not work for tables where the rows and columns are implied with white space, instead of lines. When I reached out to aws they confirmed this problem and suggested that I draw the table lines into the PDF and then run textract again on this modified pdf. This felt like a dirty hack so I did not proceed with this suggestion.

Textract is a great tool when it works well, but unfortunately when it doesn't there are no ways to make adjustments in order to improve the results. In the end I managed to complete my project and get a lot better results by using the excellent Camelot Python table extraction library.

<comment><USER11> "The problem is that while Textract works really well for well defined tabular data it does not work for tables where the rows and columns are implied with white space, instead of lines."

This is what Tabula and Camelot call "Stream" and "Lattice" parsing methods.

Whitespace between cells is Stream, demarcated lines is Lattice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Vicarious has text recognition technology that is invariant to, i.e., letter spacing, but they haven't released it due to fear of CAPTCHA fraud. See, i.e., [here]([https://i.imgur.com/lN4AzmE.png](https://i.imgur.com/lN4AzmE.png)).

I wonder if they could modify it to release a near 100% accurate OCR service?

<comment><USER19> Letter spacing seems like an arbitrary distinction. IF you design a neural net that contains operators that make certain things invariant (e.g. size) then of course it would perform better than a neural net without it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> unless i am having a hard time reading the text on the site, they all are $1500 for 1M images, but Amazon Textract, which has the second lowest average result, is "cheapest" compared to Azure Congnitive Services, which has the highest average result... Did i miss something? How is 4 items, all the same price, ranked arseways?

<comment><USER21> For 1 million images, it's $1500 across all, but as you scale to 5m images, the prices must differ.

<comment><USER20> it doesn't mention that... thats what confused me...

<comment><USER21> Look at the table sub-headings (the blue row)

<comment><USER20> (faceplam) missed that! thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm new to the OCR space. Given the the successes in self-driving (given no systems are production ready, Waymo and Tesla have MVPs), what makes reading text so hard that cloud providers struggle to have human-level accuracies?

<comment><USER23> Same problems as with self-driving cars and speech recognition: it's very very hard (if not impossible) for software to parse the universe of scenarios. Said another way, it's never accurate enough to "work" when it's trained on the outside world. Usable output requires the kind of accuracy you only get when the process is trained in controlled environments (limited "vocabulary": fonts, layouts, languages, words, accents, geography, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are there any open source alternatives that are competitive in this space?

<comment><USER25> Google is behind tesseract[0], not sure if they use this for Google Cloud Vision OCR

[0]: [https://opensource.google.com/projects/tesseract](https://opensource.google.com/projects/tesseract)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Toutanova, one of the co-authors of the BERT paper worked for Microsoft for 12+ years until shifting to Google recently.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is one of those things that badly needs an open source solution, and for which technology exists to solve it really well, but nobody wants to do it because it's a ton of really boring, high-maintenance work.

</comment><comment><USER28> I did this a while back with speech to text services. Microsoft's offerings by far beat out the others in terms of accuracy and performance.

</comment><comment><USER29> Malicious gossip has it that you have to perform these tests with Google/Amazon when the Mechanical Turk is not sleeping.

</comment><comment><USER18> For what it's worth the Wolfram text recognition function does a poor job parsing the whiteboard photo: [http://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/user-900a994f-78ab-4931-b18e...](http://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/user-900a994f-78ab-4931-b18e-353eff4d0b33/text_recognition.png)

(Not a critique of Wolfram technologies here; their services are otherwise amazing).

<comment><USER30> FYI that link just gives a log-in screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How does iOS Vision + Core ML compare?

</comment><comment><USER32> My app, Quotable, uses Azure if you were curious about perf. Works great!

</comment><comment><USER33> It's nice to see progress on handwriting recognition.

</comment><comment><USER34> Comparison should include the Apple Newton.

<comment><USER35> That couldn't do OCR at all, right? It had no camera. It could do handwriting recognition on stylus input (where it has full perfect stroke data, not just pixelated images _of_ strokes), which is a very different and easier problem.

<comment><USER11> The Apple Newton was capable of online OCR (doesn't have to do with internet connectivity in this case).

As you mention, online OCR is when you input the strokes directly on the device vs offline OCR where the input is an image.

Some trivia:

The first version of handwriting recognition engine of the Newton was developed by ParaGraph International (founded by the founder of Evernote). Another version (Print Recognizer) was later developed by Apple.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120324055221/http://www.beanbl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120324055221/http://www.beanblossom.in.us/larryy/Yaegeretal.AIMag.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Bombing Hasn't Worked. Bombing Won't Work. And Yet, We Will Bomb - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenation.com/article/bombs-over-brains/ <comment><USER2> Actually, the right kind of bombing does work to great effect. Namely fuel/air bombing. It's also cheaper than conventional bombing.

The bomb detonates at an altitude over the target area and literally blankets it in fire, not necessarily destroying all the infrastructure. Couple this with perimeter napalm runs for a couple of hours and if the heat doesn't kill the enemy, suffocation most certainly will. Less ground troops to mop up the stragglers. Time these bombings for maximum effect. Saw these used whilst in the military. They do work and they work well. Does the West have the mettle and will to deploy them, though?

<comment><USER3> To bomb the homes of terrorists? In San Barnardino or Belgium?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bombing does work well - for the arms industry though.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do websites ignore HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE? - <AUTHOR>

My browser sends 'en-US,en' for English. Yet many sites surreptitiously use a geo-ip lookup to decide what language I "should" be using.<p>I'm curious to know the pros and cons for this practice. <comment><USER2> From stats ("site lang set by header and then changed by user"), most browsers are misconfigured (Everyone Is American, yay! Except those weird people who are not, oh well, let's send an accept-language of en-US anyway.)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a personal pet hate of mine. As an English speaker in a non-English speaking country I have everything targeted at me in the wrong language.

What annoys me the most is that it is a huge waste of resources to target ads at me in the wrong language, especially when my browser is passing my preferred language preferences.

Now multiply that by the millions of people who are being mistargetted by ad delivery companies (Google I'm looking at you). What awful losses.

<comment><USER4> What gets me the most is things like Google/fb login pages etc - there is no (that I can see) way to change language on these pages - you have to guess what shit does, which is even harder when you use them only when client work demands integration with one of them, and thus are not familiar.

<comment><USER5> both fb and google login change language is @ bottom

google's at bottom right

fb's at bottom with largest languages, and a button that opens a modal for the rest.</comment></comment></comment>


Understanding modern UEFI-based platform boot - <AUTHOR> https://depletionmode.com/uefi-boot.html <comment><USER2> _Important note: Secure Boot is not designed to defend against an attacker with physical access to a machine_

Unfortunately, in practice that's what it often does, and the user is considered an "attacker". All this complexity is scary, and threatens to turn PCs into locked-down devices like the mobile world has done. I wonder if pre- UEFI/pre-ME x86 systems will become more valuable sometime in the future, because of this.

<comment><USER3> You can disable secure boot in the "BIOS"

I had the same worry, some 15 years ago I think it was the top of the "they're trying to lock PCs down 100%". Today I don't worry so much

<comment><USER4> From what I hear, Apple tries _extremely_ hard to block Linux from booting on new Macbook models. Disabling "secure boot" isn't enough.

<comment><USER5> I find it strange that they bother, since in the end you can always just run a fullscreen Linux VM and hand it over 99% of the computer's resources.

Maybe Apple's true worry might be revealed by considering the difference between what they allow and what they prevent. Apple _allow_ you to have a wholly-Linux UX on an Apple laptop; but they don't _allow_ Linux developers to run a Linux kernel directly on Apple hardware.

Maybe what they're really concerned about is Linux having an easy testbed for developing MacBook hardware/peripheral drivers, such as for the T2, such that people could build apps in other OSes that take advantage of the touchbar, and thus in some way "commoditize" one of the costlier USPs of macOS?

<comment><USER6> They actually don't prevent you from running a Linux kernel on their hardware, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really wish efibootmgr did validation to ensure the EFI entries were correct and pointing to valid executables. I've seen a lot of devices where the firmware won't even list entries if it can't find the actually file it should load. Dell firmware is some of the best because it lets you edit EFI vars right in the setup screen, and even search for and add boot entries.

</comment><comment><USER8> Speaking of UEFI ... if anyone wants to try Secure Boot with OVMF—the open source implementation of UEFI for virtual machines—in a Linux-based environment, here's a stupid shell script (usual caveat, please inspect it before you run :-)) that I sometimes use for testing.

It installs a minimal ( _@core_ -only in 'kickstart' parlance) Fedora with Secure Boot, which you can verify by ` _dmesg | grep Secure_ ` once the guest boots.

I wrote this script on a Fedora 29 host, with KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine), libvirt, QEMU and OVMF / EDK2 packages.

[1] [https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/Create-a-SecureBoot- enable...](https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/Create-a-SecureBoot-enabled- VM.bash)</comment>


How to Not Launch a Startup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tomsawada/how-to-not-launch-a-startup-e5331c9d7f8d <comment><USER2> > In 2018 we did our small, invite-only beta launch.

The author was extraordinarily lucky here.

When I started my most successful company to date (a couple of lifetimes ago), we launched our product with a ton of fanfare. It was a communications product, and our launch event consisted of a live demo attended by most of the tech media and a surprising amount of mainstream media on both coasts of the US.

The demo failed hard, in the most embarrassing way possible, and my company was subjected to a humiliating amount of ridicule by some of the tech media's heaviest hitters for months. Especially from John Dvorak.

A small, invite-only beta launch would have been much better!

It worked out in the end, since as I mentioned, the product and company eventually became a substantial success for everyone involved. But man, I still occasionally get night sweats over that launch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! If this was hard for us, I can only imagine how hard that must have been. Kudos to you for going through such a storm. We're OK now, the product is working and we have users, but we could have easily gone up in smoke. Good thing your business actually became a business and it was good for everybody involved.</comment></comment>